“For every multi-millionaire dollar Robert Rauschenberg estate, there are thousands of lesser-known talents whose families have to confront the tough decisions about what to do with hundreds of artworks and archives. To sort out the realities facing artists and their loved ones, [Hrag Vartanian] invited two experts in the field.” (podcast) – Hyperallergic
Great Theatre Challenging Capitalism — At $1,000 Or More Per Ticket
“We are lingering in a moment in which there is a fashion, or even a giddiness, for spending large sums of money on theatrical experiences that explore the foundations and promises of American capitalism.” – The New York Times
UK Museums To Compare Detailed Visitor Figures With Those From Other Leisure Outlets
“A consortium of 18 organisations, including the Tate group of galleries, the British Museum and Imperial War Museums, has contracted market researchers DJS Research for a major project that will assess visitor experience, satisfaction and attendance over the next four years” — and will compare the findings with similar data from such attractions as theme parks. – Arts Professional
Are These Two Guys In India Building The World’s Largest Public Library?
That’s how they’re describing it, but not really — it’s more like the world’s largest poetry-in-the-subways-and-streets project, and it’s called StickLit. – The Guardian
How Instagram Is Ruining Our Iconic Wild Spaces
“It is now axiomatic that a locale of stunning natural beauty will quickly degrade into a morass of crowding once it is posted on the platform as a pristine image. The herd instinct kicks in, and other users who also want to be photographed in those same lovely landscapes converge with their own cameras and Instagram accounts and followers—ad infinitum, ad nauseam.” – The New Republic
As Social Media Ages, Some Who Documented Their Own Lives Turn Away, For Their Kids
Don’t do it for the children! In other words, some parents, even in tech-obsessed San Francisco, refuse to put their kids online. “They cite reasons ranging from preserving children’s safety to giving their children agency over their own online presences.” – San Francisco Chronicle
The Impossible Dream (Come True) Of Scoring A Documentary
When students get a chance to write music for a documentary about a musician, one composer, who had never been into TV or movies, realizes this is the path: “I see media like TV and film in a different light now. I see it as a medium to explore the narrative of our humanity. It’s this process of sharing our stories, our lives, and our dreams that makes it so compelling, and music can participate by highlighting these aspects.” – NewMusicBox
Why Are Many Of Us Obsessed With Reading Books Quickly?
The point is, the act of reading is rarely a simple case of ‘finish one, start another one’—it’s an endless overlapping conversation between reader and page, an imprecise gumbo of genres and moods and facts and jokes and… cliffhangers. – Melville House
People Still Want To See Inside Fragile Historical Buildings. Now They Can… Virtually
Churches damaged by earthquakes, buildings ravaged by fire. It’s too dangerous for visitors to enter, or perhaps the site will be damaged by visits. Now a trove of 3D models has been put online so you can explore… – The Guardian
John Cameron Mitchell’s New Podcast Has A Galaxy Of Stars And A Singing Brain Tumor
Anthem: Homunculus “is not the first podcast musical to be released. And though it contains a love ballad from a brain tumor to its host, it may not even be the strangest. But it is probably the most ambitious and, with a cast that includes [Patti] LuPone, Glenn Close, Cynthia Erivo, Marion Cotillard and Laurie Anderson (as the tumor), certainly the starriest.” – The New York Times
In The Early 20th Century, Birmingham AL Had 20 Theatres In Five Blocks. Then…
They closed from neglect. Most were abandoned or turned into storefronts. Now, one-by-one they’re being restored and reopened. It’s quite grand. – BBC
Italian Futurism Led Straight To Fascism (And The Same Could Happen Again Elsewhere)
“There are lessons to be learned for today’s technologists and futurists in Marinetti’s [Futurist Manifesto], and it would be foolish to ignore them. Let’s first take a look at the words often used to describe the Italian Futurist movement: invention, modernity, speed, industry, disruption, brash, energetic. … Does any of this sound familiar?” – Wired
Penguin Random House Starts Airline-Style Frequent Reader Program
The PRH Reader Rewards Loyalty Program will let members enter proof-of-purchase info online; when you reach 120 points (roughly ten books, the company says), you get up to $30 credit toward ordering Penguin Random House titles. – Publishers Weekly
Guggenheim’s Hilma Af Klint Show Is Most Popular In Museum’s History
“The solo show for the Swedish artist, which has been widely praised by critics, has drawn in over 600,000 visitors. That influx of foot traffic has been accompanied by a 34 percent increase in membership to the museum.” – ARTnews
Baltimore Symphony Gets $3.2 Million From Maryland Legislature
“[The move is] a potentially crucial step toward resolving a contentious labor dispute” — the musicians have been playing without a contract since January — “and allowing the organization to remain a year-round ensemble.” – The Baltimore Sun
Former Volunteer Docent Leaves Surprise $8 Million To Philadelphia Museum
Estelle Rubens, who died in January of 2018, was a popular guide at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for about 15 years, and she had told officials there that she’d leave the museum and school “a little something.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
We Can Bring Peace, Afghanistan’s First All-Female Orchestra Tells Taliban
Says Negin Khpelwak, the 22-year-old leader of the Zohra Orchestra, “We can bring freedom, peace and honor to Afghanistan. Women can’t go back to the dark days — they can break our instruments, they can ban the music, but they never take it from our hearts.” – Bloomberg
New Orleans African American Museum Opens — For The Third Time
“Last week, in the historic (and historically black) Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, the city’s African American Museum officially opened its doors to the public after a six-year closure.” Well, part of it did. “So, what is behind the re-reopening — or more importantly, the repeated closures — of a nonprofit cultural institution that debuted in 1998 but has since been shuttered twice, in each instance for several years at a time?” – Nonprofit Quarterly
The Complexity Fetish
If you’ve been to any leadership development or organizational change workshop lately, you’ve heard about complexity quite a bit. But I’ve slowly (slowly) started to realize that I, and many in my crowd, love complexity just a bit too much. – Andrew Taylor
Tracing Bloodlines
The Stephen Petronio Company at NYU Skirball Center on April 12, 2019. – Deborah Jowitt
Method Actors Lose Themselves In Their Roles. Just What Does That Mean And How Does It Work?
They don’t literally forget who they are, since their actual beliefs and desires remain the same. (Put in terms of the model: their Belief and Desire boxes retain their original contents.) However, fully immersed actors ‘forget themselves’ in the sense that they actively ignore facts about who they are, temporarily subordinating their own thoughts and feelings to those of their character. Actors forget their identities like stoners forget the quadratic formula. The information isn’t gone – just temporarily offline. – Aeon
Colm Tóibín Faces Down Testicular Cancer
On “chemo brain”: “It was not merely that the chemo left me fully thoughtless so that as time went on I could not even read; the effect of the drug darkened the mind or filled it with something hard and severe and relentless. It was like pain or a sort of anguish, but those words don’t really cover it. Everything that normally kept the day going, and the mind, was reduced to almost zero.” – London Review of Books
Why Are TV Writers Are Firing Their Agents? (The People Who Get Them Work)??
We have questions. New York Magazine’s Jordan Crucchiola has some answers. – New York Magazine
Censorship In Prison Libraries — How Far Does It Go?
“The public doesn’t really know the extent of censorship in prison libraries, and it seems that prisons don’t want us to know.” But Christina Cerio took a stab at figuring it out. – Melville House
The Small-Town Grouch Who Declared ‘Libraries Are Communist’ Was Right, Thank Goodness
Theman who said that was in a rural hamlet in the mountains of New York state, and Sue Halpern had just been dragooned by the town board to set up a lending library with a total of $15,000. About a year on, after tremendous success, Halpern decided she agreed: “A public library is predicated on an ethos of sharing and egalitarianism. … It is defiantly, proudly, communal.” – The New York Review of Books